This link has been bookmarked by 63 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 May 2006, by Tejas patel.
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28 Oct 09
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The shielding of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be
useless if it were. It's pierced in a few places to let pipes in.
An optimism shield has to be pierced too. I think the place to
draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you
expect of other people. It's ok to be optimistic about what you
can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people.
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Wufoo took this to heart and released
their form-builder before the underlying database. You can't even
drive the thing yet, but 83,000 people came to sit in the driver's
seat and hold the steering wheel. And Wufoo got valuable feedback
from it: Linux users complained they used too much Flash, so they
rewrote their software not to. If they'd waited to release everything
at once, they wouldn't have discovered this problem till it was
more deeply wired in. -
So it is with hacking: the more ideas you implement, the more
ideas you'll have. - 15 more annotations...
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You should make your system better at least in
some small way every day or two. -
When you're running a startup you feel like a little bit of debris
blown about by powerful winds. The most powerful wind is users.
They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they did
with Google, or leave you flat on the pavement, as they do with
most startups. Users are a fickle wind, but more powerful than any
other. If they take you up, no competitor can keep you down. -
I like the wind metaphor because it reminds you how impersonal the
stream of traffic is. The vast majority of people who visit your
site will be casual visitors. It's them you have to design your
site for. The people who really care will find what they want by
themselves. -
There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most
important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell
your site is about. -
The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you've got,
right away. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the
front page, because that's the only one most visitors will see. -
In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell
visitors what your site is about by showing them. One of the
standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell."
Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or
break his pencil in half. Nothing will explain what your site does
so well as using it. -
Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to
their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages,
and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases
their customers told them what their business should be-- and they
were smart enough to listen. -
As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than
the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by
looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
This principle is very powerful. It's why the best abstract painting
still falls short of Leonardo, for example. And it applies to
startups too. No idea for a product could ever be so clever as the
ones you can discover by smashing a beam of prototypes into a beam
of users. -
Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by
people who dropped out of school to do it. -
Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it's possible, but
it requires extraordinary effort. If an ordinary employee were
asked to do the things a startup founder has to, he'd be very
indignant. Imagine if you were hired at some big company, and in
addition to writing software ten times faster than you'd ever had
to before, they expected you to answer support calls, administer
the servers, design the web site, cold-call customers, find the
company office space, and go out and get everyone lunch.
And to do all this not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big
company, but against a backdrop of constant disasters. That's the
part that really demands determination. In a startup, there's
always some disaster happening. So if you're the least bit inclined
to find an excuse to quit, there's always one right there. -
At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the
attitude that they're going to give this startup thing a shot for
three months, and if something great happens, they'll stick with
it-- "something great" meaning either that someone wants to buy
them or invest millions of dollars in them. But if this is your
attitude, "something great" is very unlikely to happen to you,
because both acquirers and investors judge you by your level of
commitment. -
What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not
the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out.
[6]
So if
you make it clear you're going to succeed no matter what, and the only
reason you need them is to make it happen a little faster, you're
much more likely to get money. -
Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals.
If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it's not going to
happen. The VCs who say they're going to invest in you aren't.
The company that says they're going to buy you isn't. The big
customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won't.
Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised. -
The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting
lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors
and acquirers scurry alongside trying to wave money in your face. -
Similarly, don't make users register to try your site. Maybe
what you have is so valuable that visitors should gladly register
to get at it. But they've been trained to expect the opposite.
Most of the things they've tried on the web have sucked-- and
probably especially those that made them register.
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You need this for everyone:
investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and
even current employees. You probably shouldn't even start a company
to do something that can't be described compellingly in one or two
sentences. -
If you have something impressive, try to put it on the
front page, because that's the only one most visitors will see. - 48 more annotations...
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give people everything you've got,
right away. -
the more you push the good
stuff toward the front, the more likely visitors are to explore
further.
[5] -
One of the
standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell."
Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or
break his pencil in half. Nothing will explain what your site does
so well as using it. -
The industry term here is "conversion." The job of your site is
to convert casual visitors into users-- whatever your definition
of a user is. You can measure this in your growth rate. Either
your site is catching on, or it isn't, and you must know which. -
"don't worry about this; worry about that instead."
Startups are right to be paranoid, but they sometimes fear the wrong
things. -
Disasters
are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent
that covers what you're doing, your servers keep crashing, you run
into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name,
a deal falls through-- these are all par for the course. They won't
kill you unless you let them. -
The people at Google
are smart, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because
Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails;
and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down. -
but other startups you don't know exist yet. They're way more
dangerous than Google because, like you, they're cornered animals. -
A corollary is that
you shouldn't relax just because you have no visible competitors
yet. No matter what your idea, there's someone else out there
working on the same thing. -
More people are starting
startups, but not as many more as could. -
The average person can't ignore
something that's been beaten into their head since they were three
just because serving web pages recently got a lot cheaper. -
There
are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal
disputes, inertia, and ignoring users. -
Way more
startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There
are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal
disputes, inertia, and ignoring users.
Each is, by itself, enough
to kill you. But if I had to pick the worst, it would be ignoring
users. If you want a recipe for a startup that's going to die,
here it is: a couple of founders who have some great idea they know
everyone is going to love, and that's what they're going to build,
no matter what. -
If companies stuck to
their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages,
and Apple would be selling printed circuit boards. In both cases
their customers told them what their business should be-- and they
were smart enough to listen. -
I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what
the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not
what you might think. The most important quality in a startup
founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination. -
There are two ways to do
work you love: (a) to make money, then work
on what you love, or (b) to get a job where you get paid to work on
stuff you love. In practice the first phases of both
consist mostly of unedifying schleps, and in (b) the second phase is less
secure. -
VCs have rational reasons for behaving this way. They don't
make their money (if they make money) off their median investments.
In a typical fund, half the companies fail, most of the rest generate
mediocre returns, and one or two "make the fund" by succeeding
spectacularly. So if they miss just a few of the most promising
opportunities, it could hose the whole fund. -
Similarly, don't make users register to try your site. Maybe
what you have is so valuable that visitors should gladly register
to get at it. But they've been trained to expect the opposite.
Most of the things they've tried on the web have sucked-- and
probably especially those that made them register. -
It should not always tell this to users, however. For example,
MySpace is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. But it was
wiser for them, initially, to pretend that the site was about bands. -
There are times in most of our
lives when the days go by in a blur, and almost everyone has a
sense, when this happens, of wasting something precious. As Ben
Franklin said, if you love life, don't waste time, because time is
what life is made of. -
So why do I spend so much time thinking about startups? I'll tell
you why. Economically, a startup is best seen not as a way to get
rich, but as a way to work faster. You have to make a living, and
a startup is a way to get that done quickly, instead of letting it
drag on through your whole life.
[9] -
There is nothing grand or
heroic about starting a startup per se. -
So why do it? It would be worth enduring a lot of pain and stress
to do something grand or heroic, but just to make money? Is making
money really that important? -
So I want to plant a hypnotic suggestion in your heads: when you
hear someone say the words "we want to invest in you" or "we want
to acquire you," I want the following phrase to appear automatically
in your head: don't get your hopes up. Just continue running
your company as if this deal didn't exist. Nothing is more likely
to make it close. -
VCs and corp dev guys are professional negotiators. They're trained
to take advantage of weakness.
[8]
So while they're often nice
guys, they just can't help it. And as pros they do this more than
you. So don't even try to bluff them. The only way a startup can
have any leverage in a deal is genuinely not to need it. And if
you don't believe in a deal, you'll be less likely to depend on it. -
There are usually a lot of subsidiary questions to be cleared
up after the handshake, and if the other side senses weakness-- if
they sense you need this deal-- they will be very tempted to screw
you in the details. -
For example, if someone says they want to invest in you, there's a
natural tendency to stop looking for other investors.
That's why
people proposing deals seem so positive: they
want
you to
stop looking. And you want to stop too, because doing deals is a
pain. Raising money, in particular, is a huge time sink. So you
have to consciously force yourself to keep looking. -
That's why
people proposing deals seem so positive: they want you to
stop looking. And you want to stop too, because doing deals is a
pain. Raising money, in particular, is a huge time sink. So you
have to consciously force yourself to keep looking. -
Shielding your optimism is nowhere more important than with deals.
If your startup is doing a deal, just assume it's not going to
happen. The VCs who say they're going to invest in you aren't.
The company that says they're going to buy you isn't. The big
customer who wants to use your system in their whole company won't.
Then if things work out you can be pleasantly surprised. -
This is particularly necessary in a startup, because you tend to
be pushing the limits of whatever you're doing. So things don't
happen in the smooth, predictable way they do in the rest of the
world. Things change suddenly, and usually for the worse. -
But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat
the core of a nuclear reactor: as a source of power that's also
very dangerous. You have to build a shield around it, or it will
fry you. -
The shielding of a reactor is not uniform; the reactor would be
useless if it were. It's pierced in a few places to let pipes in.
An optimism shield has to be pierced too. I think the place to
draw the line is between what you expect of yourself, and what you
expect of other people. It's ok to be optimistic about what you
can do, but assume the worst about machines and other people. -
It seems to me the only limit would be the number of people who
want to work that hard. -
The reason we don't see the opportunities all around us is that we
adjust to however things are, and assume that's how things have to
be. For example, it would seem crazy to most people to try to make
a better search engine than Google. Surely that field, at least,
is tapped out. Really? In a hundred years-- or even twenty-- are
people still going to search for information using something like
the current Google? Even Google probably doesn't think that. -
There is always room for new stuff. At every point in history,
even the darkest bits of the dark ages, people were discovering
things that made everyone say "why didn't anyone think of that
before?" We know this continued to be true up till 2004, when the
Facebook was founded-- though strictly speaking someone else did
think of that. -
You have to be the right kind of determined, though. I carefully
chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness
is a disastrous quality in a startup. You have to be determined,
but flexible, like a running back. A successful running back doesn't
just put his head down and try to run through people. He improvises:
if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone
tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in
the wrong direction briefly if that will help. The one thing he'll
never do is stand still.
[7] -
What really motivates investors, even big VCs, is not
the hope of good returns, but the fear of missing out. -
If an acquirer thinks you're going to stick around no matter what,
they'll be more likely to buy you, because if they don't and you
stick around, you'll probably grow, your price will go up, and
they'll be left wishing they'd bought you earlier. Ditto for
investors. -
At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the
attitude that they're going to give this startup thing a shot for
three months, and if something great happens, they'll stick with
it-- "something great" meaning either that someone wants to buy
them or invest millions of dollars in them. But if this is your
attitude, "something great" is very unlikely to happen to you,
because both acquirers and investors judge you by your level of
commitment. -
Whereas if you're determined to stick around, people will pay
attention to you, because odds are they'll have to deal with you
later. You're a local, not just a tourist, so everyone has to come
to terms with you. -
But if you lack commitment, chances are it will have been hurting
you long before you actually quit. Everyone who deals with startups
knows how important commitment is, so if they sense you're ambivalent,
they won't give you much attention. If you lack commitment, you'll
just find that for some mysterious reason good things happen to
your competitors but not to you. If you lack commitment, it will
seem to you that you're unlucky. -
And to do all this not in the calm, womb-like atmosphere of a big
company, but against a backdrop of constant disasters. That's the
part that really demands determination. In a startup, there's
always some disaster happening. So if you're the least bit inclined
to find an excuse to quit, there's always one right there. -
If an ordinary employee were
asked to do the things a startup founder has to, he'd be very
indignant. Imagine if you were hired at some big company, and in
addition to writing software ten times faster than you'd ever had
to before, they expected you to answer support calls, administer
the servers, design the web site, cold-call customers, find the
company office space, and go out and get everyone lunch. -
Running a startup is like walking on your hands: it's possible, but
it requires extraordinary effort. -
You can lose quite a lot in the brains department and it won't kill
you. But lose even a little bit in the commitment department, and
that will kill you very rapidly. -
Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were all founded by
people who dropped out of school to do it. What students lack in
experience they more than make up in dedication. -
Time after time VCs invest in startups founded by eminent professors.
This may work in biotech, where a lot of startups simply commercialize
existing research, but in software you want to invest in students,
not professors. -
As Richard Feynman said, the imagination of nature is greater than
the imagination of man. You'll find more interesting things by
looking at the world than you could ever produce just by thinking.
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Andy BrudtkuhlThe startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive. We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a trick for
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Starting a Business
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Thomas Vander WalPaul Graham's presentation from the Start-up School
advice article business code company development entrepreneur entrepreneurship finance internet paulgraham worklife wisdom webdesign work web vc technology startup project programming productivity usability software webapp webdev
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01 May 06
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